Rush hour

Soderbergh and Douglas in a Traffic jam

by Peter Keough

Maybe directors like Gus Van Sant and Steven Soderbergh will save Hollywood, or
maybe they are just selling out. Outsiders at heart, they nonetheless make
movies with the likes of Robin Williams, Sean Connery, Julia Roberts, and
Michael Douglas that are an uneasy balancing of submission and subversion. Then
again, if these directors score big with a mainstream film, chances are the
studios are going to let them do something more independent.

Soderbergh's 1999 The Limey was an original, underrated experiment
featuring a terrific and largely overlooked performance from Terence Stamp.
After his success last spring with Erin Brockovich, which is now being
hyped for the Oscars, Traffic looked like Soderbergh's opportunity to
return to his maverick ways. And at first glance, the film seems raw, hip, and
trenchant, bubbling with style and savvy. But look again and Traffic may
seem merely slick, a cynical film about cynicism that is, in its own way, more
conventional than the Julia Roberts vehicle. It operates partly on the
principle that if you multiply the number of stereotypical stories, interweave
them artfully, use handheld cameras and atmospheric filters, and elicit gritty,
authentic performances pepped up by smart dialogue, the result won't seem so
formulaic. Well, maybe.

Story #1, shot in scruffy cinéma-vérité with a gold tint,
starts in the desert south of the border, where honest Mexican cop Javier
Rodríguez (Benicio Del Toro) and partner Manolo (Jacob Vargas) have
bagged a van full of coke only to have it impounded by slippery General Salazar
(Tomás Milián), who later invites Rodríguez to join him in
destroying the Tijuana drug cartel. Story #2 starts in a blue-tinted courtroom
in Columbus, Ohio, where Justice Robert Wakefield (Michael Douglas) puts away
one last case before taking up his post as the president's new drug czar in
Washington. Little does he know that his teenage daughter Caroline (Erika
Christensen), a model student and spoiled brat, is partying with her
school-uniformed friends and getting introduced by boyfriend Seth (Topher
Grace) to the pleasures of crack cocaine. Story #3 has beaming and pregnant
Helena Ayala (Catherine Zeta-Jones) chatting with her girlfriends at the
country club over wine and duck and totally unaware that undercover cops Roy
Castro (Luis Guzman) and Montel Gordon (Don Cheadle), who in story #4 are
pulling a sting on coke dealer Eduardo Ruiz (Miguel Ferrer), will soon reel in
her drug-kingpin husband, David (Alec Roberts), whom she always thought was a
respectable San Diego businessman.

You never know about people, do you? Like Requiem for a Dream,
Traffic uses slick style to convey the platitude that beneath the
façade of respectability, success, and family values lies a void that
greed, ambition, and addiction seek to fill. It's the low-rent version of
American Beauty. As Soderbergh's glib shots of characters from different
tales passing one another like ships in the night suggest, we're all just one
off-ramp from the highway to hell.

Based on a 1980s British Channel 4 television series, Traffic deftly
compresses its story lines to make you feel you're watching half a dozen
episodes at once. What this dazzling mix can't do is disguise the way the
Michael Douglas plot line drifts off into a toothless variation of Paul
Schrader's Hardcore, or make Zeta-Jones's transformation from vacant
trophy wife to tough cookie as convincing as her swordsmanship in The Mask
of Zorro. And though Soderbergh knows how to reverse your expectations -- a
character introduced as a merciless killer becomes a figure of wretched pity
when naked and tortured -- he's not above exploiting them. We haven't come very
far from Birth of a Nation when for a white girl utter degradation is
being a sex slave for a black stud.

So, should we just say no to Traffic? It's a must-see if only for the
sight of Bill Weld holding forth on the drug problem at a DC party, just one of
the many pedantic soundbites ("Larry King" moments, as Cheadle's character
points out) scattered throughout. That and perhaps the finest ensemble cast of
the year make Traffic, if not the high point of Steven Soderbergh's
career, at least worth the trip.